David Elginbrod eBook

But I am putting the boy’s feelings into forms
and words for him. He had none of either for
them.

CHAPTER XIII.

A storm.

When the mind’s free,
The body’s delicate: the tempest in my
mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there.

King Lear.

While Harry took to wandering abroad in the afternoon
sun, Hugh, on the contrary, found the bright weather
so distasteful to him, that he generally trifled away
his afternoons with some old romance in the dark library,
or lay on the couch in his study, listless and suffering.
He could neither read nor write. What he felt
he must do he did; but nothing more.

One day, about noon, the weather began to change.
In the afternoon it grew dark; and Hugh, going to
the window, perceived with delight —­ the
first he had experienced for many days —­
that a great thunder-storm was at hand. Harry
was rather frightened; but under his fear, there evidently
lay a deep delight. The storm came nearer and
nearer; till at length a vivid flash broke from the
mass of darkness over the woods, lasted for one brilliant
moment, and vanished. The thunder followed,
like a pursuing wild beast, close on the traces of
the vanishing light; as if the darkness were hunting
the light from the earth, and bellowing with rage that
it could not overtake and annihilate it. Without
the usual prelude of a few great drops, the rain poured
at once, in continuous streams, from the dense canopy
overhead; and in a few moments there were six inches
of water all round the house, which the force of the
falling streams made to foam, and fume, and flash
like a seething torrent. Harry had crept close
to Hugh, who stood looking out of the window; and
as if the convulsion of the elements had begun to clear
the spiritual and moral, as well as the physical atmosphere,
Hugh looked down on the boy kindly, and put his arm
round his shoulders. Harry nestled closer, and
wished it would thunder for ever. But longing
to hear his tutor’s voice, he ventured to speak,
looking up to his face:

“Euphra says it is only electricity, Mr. Sutherland.
What is that?”

A common tutor would have seized the opportunity of
explaining what he knew of the laws and operations
of electricity. But Hugh had been long enough
a pupil of David to feel that to talk at such a time
of anything in nature but God, would be to do the boy
a serious wrong. One capable of so doing would,
in the presence of the Saviour himself, speculate
on the nature of his own faith; or upon the death
of his child, seize the opportunity of lecturing on
anatomy. But before Hugh could make any reply,
a flash, almost invisible from excess of light, was
accompanied rather than followed by a roar that made
the house shake; and in a moment more the room was
filled with the terrified household, which, by an unreasoning
impulse, rushed to the neighbourhood of him who was
considered the strongest. —­ Mr. Arnold
was not at home.